It is certainly a worrisome development that the overseas job market for the Bangladeshi workers is shrinking. It has, indeed, shrunk by 50 per cent until now since 2007. The job opportunities abroad are likely to diminish further unless the cost of migration is reduced to a logical level.
The expatriates welfare and overseas employment minister, according to a report in the FE this week, has expressed his concern over the fact that labour markets for the Bangladeshi workers, especially in the Middle East, have almost been closed due to sending a large number of workers there under 'fake demands'. On the other hand, he said, high visa cost is taking a toll on migration of the Bangladeshi jobseekers there.
The government is now probing the reasons behind high costs of visa and other migration-related charges or fees which are hindering Bangladesh's manpower exports abroad. This move has been taken up as it was noticed that an insignificant number of the Bangladesh workers are going to Kuwait despite issuance of a good number of visas to expatriate workers, by this oil-rich Gulf nation.
The Bangladesh embassy in Kuwait has reportedly informed the concerned authorities recently that on an average, a Bangladeshi job-seeker is paying up to Tk 271,000 to procure a visa which, in turn, reportedly goes to employers, sponsors, recruiting agents and middlemen. However, the amount reaches up to as high as Tk 350,000 to Tk 400,000 for a job-seeker to land in Kuwait.
Meanwhile, a number of countries in the Middle East had earlier put on hold the issuance of any fresh work permit or visa to the Bangladeshis. It is not known for certain whether all such restrictions have been withdrawn. But some relaxations have been made by such countries in case of recruitment of workers from Pakistan and a few other countries which had also come earlier under restrictions.
A good number of Bangladeshi workers in the labour-receiving countries were reported to have engaged themselves in some unlawful activities to earn the money they spent for visa. Once visas are issued by the employers there, those have been changing hands several times starting from sponsors/employers to various stages of middlemen until those reach Bangladesh.
Afterwards, the main buyers of visas/work-permits reportedly sell those to other recruiting agencies which employ middlemen across the countries to collect job-seekers. Since such visas change hands several times in both Bangladesh and abroad, the cost goes up significantly, putting pressure on the job-seekers.
After long seven years of closure, the government of Kuwait was reported to have partially opened its labour market to the Bangladeshi workers in March this year. In June, only 700 Bangladeshi workers went to Kuwait with employment visas while another 500 went there between March and May. It is highly unusual that such a small number of workers have gone to Kuwait this year. Had the cost of migration been within the reach of poor jobseekers, the number of migrants could meantime have multiplied, according to sources who have closely been following the movement of the Bangladeshi workforce to the Middle East and other countries.
Bangladesh has recently expanded its official labour wings from 16 to 28 in some 25 countries. A number of labour attaches have been recruited to explore job opportunities in the prospective countries. The overseas employment minister directed the labour attachés to play appropriate roles in cutting visa and related expenses to ensure low cost of migration. He asked them to verify the demand for foreign employment after complete examinations of the documents in the host countries to help minimise the involvement of brokers in recruitment process.
However, it is not clear how such directive will help cut the costs of migration if there is no proper investigation. The minister did not also mention as to how the host recruiting agents who sell visas or work-permits to the agents of the beneficiary country would be identified and taken to task, after deployment of a labour attaché there.
Over the decades, job visas have become a tradable commodity in 'black market'. Such visas or work-permits are even put on auctions and sold to those offering the highest prices in many countries. Due to high costs of migration, many recruiting countries are not interested to hire manpower from Bangladesh. As a result, the country is losing a large amount of foreign exchange from this sector.
There is no denying that labour-exporting countries like Bangladesh do need to realise that malpractices, especially those relating to high migration costs that are involved in recruitment of manpower for the overseas markets, have been eating up the whole chunk of benefits accrued from migration. There are enough evidence and diagnosis to identify various forms of irregular practices which unduly interfere with the development gains of migration.
In fact, the migrant workers are sometimes constrained to stay beyond their period of contracts, expecting that they would be able to repay their debts in addition to remitting money to the country after meeting their subsistence costs. That is exactly the time when they turn illegal migrants under the law of the host country, becoming virtual fugitives there. In the process, the country earns a bad name. This gets reflected in different ways, one of them being the lowering of the quota for the Bangladeshi job-seekers.
While both the labour-sending and-receiving countries benefit much from labour migration, it is often the individual migrants who get overlooked. They undergo extensive financial hardship in order to migrate abroad due to exploitation and abuse in the process of recruitment. The root cause of high migration costs lies at the receiving-end; brokers play here a dominant role in raising the cost. If such cost could be lowered substantially, the migration expenses could be reduced significantly.
On its part, the government needs otherwise to develop an institutional mechanism to minimise the influence of the intermediaries. The findings of a recent survey substantiate the earlier estimates about Bangladesh having the highest cost of migration among the South Asian countries.
Bangladesh and other labour-sending countries do need to have stronger regulations and their strict enforcement for effectively reducing the cost of migration. The migration cost for a job seeker, according to some relevant analysts, should be equivalent to two months' salaries for increasing the number of employments as well as for stopping illegal stay abroad.
Under the circumstances, proper policies are urgently needed now for implementation. This would help to keep the costs of migration of the country's workers, within a reasonable limit. This will also enable the migrant workers to get reasonable returns in the form of earnings from their jobs abroad.
szkhan@dhaka.net
Tackling root causes behind ebbing of manpower export
Shahiduzzaman Khan | Published: September 04, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00
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